Be empathetic  but in a helpful way that doesn't make you sick

By Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Special to The Washington Post

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Your husband was passed over for a promotion, and he’s depressed. Your friend’s breast cancer has returned. As a supportive spouse and friend, you feel their pain. Growing research suggests there’s a cost to all that caring.

Empathy — the ability to share another person’s emotion — is essential for building intimate relationships, says Robin Stern, associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

But this connection can have a downside, particularly if you’re so consumed by another’s feelings that you neglect your own needs. Stern says those who regularly prioritize others’ emotions over their own are more susceptible to anxiety or depression.

“We want to be there for someone but not lose ourselves,” says Jamil Zaki, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University,

In a study published last year in the journal Health Psychology, researchers looked at the effects of parental empathy on 247 pairs of parents and adolescents. Through blood tests, questionnaires and diaries, researchers found parental empathy correlated with well-being in adolescents. The parents in the study benefited, too, with highly empathic parents reporting greater self-esteem and a deeper sense of purpose in their lives.

But the more empathic, the more likely that parent was to experience chronic low-grade inflammation. The researchers speculate, “Parents who readily engage with the struggles and perspectives of others may leave themselves vulnerable to additional burdens, expending physiological resources in order to better help others.”

Is there a healthier way to empathize?

Psychologists describe empathy in three ways: You can think it, feel it or be moved by it, Zaki says.

With cognitive empathy, you understand what someone else is thinking and feeling, as when you relate to a character in a novel or someone’s perspective in a business negotiation.

With emotional empathy, you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel their emotion. This type of response, if left unchecked, can lead to caretaker burnout, Zaki says.

Then there’s compassionate empathy, where you feel concern about another’s suffering, but from a distance with a desire to help the person in need.

Which perspective we take when responding to someone else’s suffering affects our own well-being.

In an upcoming study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked college students to act as a helper to a fellow student going through crisis. Each participant was asked to read a personal essay detailing the supposed student’s financial struggles and stress of being the caregiver for a younger sibling after the death of their mother.

A third of the volunteers were asked to think about how that person must feel (compassionate empathy) and a third were asked to imagine how they would feel if they were that person (emotional empathy). A control group was asked to remain objective.

Researchers found that those who put themselves in the other person’s shoes had significantly higher “fight-or-flight” responses, as though they, too, were experiencing stress.

“Over time,” lead researcher Anneke Buffone notes, “the chronic activation of the stress hormone cortisol could lead to a variety of serious health issues like cardiovascular problems, a finding that is particularly meaningful for health professionals who are confronted with others’ pain and suffering daily.”

The researchers also discovered those who were asked to react with compassion had a positive, invigorating response, as if confronting an achievable challenge or offering advice that might help.

Compassion activates a different part of the brain, areas associated with motivation and reward. So, where emotional empathy can cause pain and burnout, compassion drives you to want to help.

“Start by envisioning someone you know who may be in pain or may have gone through a stressful event, and then envision them being relieved of that suffering,” says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He says it may help to repeat a phrase in your mind, such as: May you be happy and be free of suffering.

“Encouraging the focus on the person’s well-being and happiness, instead of their distress, actually shifts our brain’s pathways from experiencing painful empathy to the more rewarding areas of compassion,” Davidson says. “It’s this process that helps us to detach from their suffering.”

Transforming emotional empathy into compassion doesn’t mean you care less, Davidson says. After all, “what kind of assistance can you provide if you’re now suffering, too?”

“Research shows that these simple exercises actually affect your actions in the real world, making you more likely to be pro-social and helpful,” he says.